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Ebright collected butterflies with the same determination that has marked all his activities. He also collected rocks, fossils, and coins. He became an eager astronomer, too, sometimes star-gazing all night

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By the time he was in the second grade, Ebright had collected all twenty-five species of butterflies found around his hometown.

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That book, which told how monarch butterflies migrate to Central America, opened the world of science to the eager young collector.  At the end of the book they were asked to tag butterflies for research by Dr Frederick A. Urquhart of the University of Toronto, Canada. For several years his basement was home to thousands of monarchs in different stages of development.

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In the seventh grade he got a hint of what real science is when he entered a county science fair — and lost. His entry was slides of frog tissues, which he showed under a microscope. He realized the winners had tried to do real experiments, not simply make a neat display

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For his eighth grade project, Ebright tried to find the cause of a viral disease that kills nearly all monarch caterpillars every few years. Ebright thought the disease might be carried by a beetle. He tried raising caterpillars in the presence of beetles. He didn't get any results but he went ahead and presented it. This time he won.

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Ebright’s project was to see whether, in fact, birds would eat monarchs. He found that a starling would not eat ordinary bird food. It would eat all the monarchs it could get. This project was placed first in the zoology division and third overall in the county science fair.

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In his second year in high school, he began the research that led to his discovery of an unknown insect hormone. lndirectly, it also led to his new theory on the life of cells.  It was necessary for the butterfly’s full development. This project won Ebright first place in the county fair.  and entry into the International Science and Engineering Fair. There he won third place for zoology. He also got a chance to work during the summer at the entomology laboratory of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

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He continued his advanced experiments on the monarch pupa. That year his project won first place at the International Science Fair and gave him another chance to work in the army laboratory during the summer.

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In senior year, he went a step further. He grew cells from a monarch’s wing in a culture and showed that the cells would divide and develop into normal butterfly wing scales only if they were fed the hormone from the gold spots. That project won first place for zoology at the International Fair. He spent the summer after graduation doing further work at the army laboratory and at the laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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Ebright went back to the laboratory of the Department of Agriculture and did more work on the hormone from the gold spots. Using the laboratory’s sophisticated instruments, he was able to identify the hormone’s chemical structure.

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During his junior year, Ebright got the idea for his new theory about cell life. It came while he was looking at X-ray photos of the chemical structure of a hormone.

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Richard Ebright graduated from Harvard with highest honours, second in his class of 1,510. Ebright went on to become a graduate student researcher at Harvard Medical School. There he began doing experiments to test his theory.

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By the time he was in the second grade, Ebright had collected all twenty-five species of butterflies found around his hometown.